A Romany Gypsy who grew up without running water and electricity has spoken out about her 'secret life'.

Phoebe Buckley spent her younger years happily travelling around the country with her family.

But as she got older she was severely bullied because of her heritage, and still believes people find it more acceptable to use racial slurs against the gypsy and traveller community than other minority groups.

Phoebe, now 33, said: "My community can be a very secretive one. They don't like sharing stuff and keep themselves to themselves.

"They are scared of opening themselves up and becoming vulnerable.

"With my job I spend a lot of my time around 'normal' people. I found it quite difficult, like a secret life.

"Some people have a perception that we all nick stuff, that no one pays their taxes.

"But everyone, including non-gypsies and travellers, pays as little tax as possible."

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Her family now live in a wooden cabin they built themselves in Willingham, South Cambridgeshire after the travelling lifestyle became 'hard to maintain'.

But Phoebe, who works in the horse industry and competes in eventing - where a single horse and rider competes against other combinations across the three disciplines of dressage, cross-country and show jumping - still misses her travelling roots.

"There are so many good memories," she added.

"Being on the road, some people see it as a negative, but actually seeing different places and meeting different people when I was quite young was brilliant.

"We did a trip of the coast and we just met so many different people. Some weren't nice but people were really interested in our community.

"I remember being about six or seven, I was in my bed in the caravan and there were so many families and I remember seeing all the kids playing.

"When I look back it was just so social. The traveller lifestyle, moving round in the summer months, there used to be places travellers could go, moving plots, it was just very social and meant you would meet up with friends in the summer that you hadn't seen all winter when you'd been more settled.

"It was a bit of an adventure, that's what it felt like, even though looking back it was also quite hard with no electricity, no running water and proper heating.

"We became more stable when I was 10 - that's when we only really travelled during the school holidays."

Phoebe says shows like 'My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding' have reinforced untrue and "unfair" stereotypes of the gypsy and traveller community; such as that women are forced to quit school and become a 'good wife'.

"It was never expected that I would go home and leave school," Phoebe said.

"I dated a traveller guy for quite a few years and it was expected I would marry him but I chose to leave him and my parents were really supportive.

"Some of my friends growing up are still traditional and travel regularly but it's more difficult to do it.

"A couple of my cousins who got married young have now gone back to school and one in particular is now working at Addenbrooke's.

"She says sometimes she hears people say you have to be careful around travellers and then she points out they work with one. People don't expect it.

"[The community] is not as dated as people think, things move on.

"I think we are behind a little bit, but we're catching up and it's not seen as a bad thing anymore. "

Phoebe's parents were born in horse-drawn wagons and never learnt to read or write, instead doing jobs like strawberry and apple picking in the summer and potato picking in the winter.

But they always encouraged Phoebe to get an education.

"Having a young baby being on the road was really difficult and my parents really wanted me to get an education. They can't read or write, even now they find it really difficult," Phoebe added.

"In secondary school I was really badly bullied.

"I ended up leaving when I was 14 just because I had a horrible time and when I look back I'm gutted I left.

"Kids can be really mean. I remember kids would follow me with deodorant bottles and tell me they were spraying me to kill the fleas because they said I was unclean.

"When we used to line up in the dinner queue they would say 'do you even know what queuing is?', basically saying we were animals and didn't know anything.

"Teachers didn't really know how to deal with it. At the time teachers tended to brush it off and that angered me.

"I was being treated meanly by kids and felt teachers should be doing more but they didn't know what to say."

Phoebe said the travelling way of life began to change in the early 1980s.

"People didn't want us on the side of the road," she said.

"That particular lifestyle was hard to maintain and the council were asking gypsies to find land and be be settled and it was done because that lifestyle was becoming increasingly difficult."

Despite having settled and built their own home, Phoebe says her family still live a simple and quite traditional gypsy lifestyle.

She said: "My parents are still adjusting, they have got a beautiful log cabin but they still heat things using a log burner."

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